I’m not really an armor builder, but I want to change that. I bought a Tamiya 1/35 German HANOMAG Sdkfz 251/1 for my stash in March, and a Tamiya 1/35 M4A3E8 Sherman last week. I’m wanting to find some good reference books for paint/camo schemes for these, but I don’t want to drop a ton of money on anything super specific in case I don’t venture into armor much in the future. Are there any decent books like the ones out there for WWII aircraft with all (or at least most) of the German armor with multiple camouflage schemes for each, and the same for US armor? Thanks in advance for the help.

German armor camo schemes are something of a grab bag. The multi color schemes, with few exceptions, were usually applied by crews in the field and not by factories to any one particular pattern. The vehicles came in a base color, units were given the secondary color paints to use, and the schemes were applied and modified to match local conditions.

US vehicles came out of the factory in Olive Drab, and if they received a painted camo scheme, it was applied by engineer camouflage units at forward depots using specific colors and somewhat consistent patterns.

All that aside, both Squadron and Osprey publishing have some good affordably priced books on painting US and German WWII vehicles.

As many of the other have said, if its just for colour schemes, you are better off looking on line. That 251 kit is very old and has plenty of accuracies issues and i would not go spending lots of refernace material just for that.